Twisted

Harry is ten years old when Vernon breaks his nose.

One second he’s bringing the gin over for Vernon to refill his glass and the next he’s on the floor, scuttling backwards with blood spurting out his nose.

Harry breathes through his mouth and tries not to cry; his nose crackles when he touches it. Aunt Petunia glares at him as she picks up the bottle.

“Look what you’ve done, gone and spilled have of it, haven’t you?” She refills Vernon’s glass. “Just one more tonight, love.”

Vernon laughs. He doesn’t glance at Harry, doesn’t seem to know he’s there.

Petunia pulls Harry up by his collar and drags him into the loo. He keeps his hands over his nose and focuses on not bumping into the walls. She forces him onto the toilet and snatches his hand away, kneeling in front of him.

“Barely bruised,” she says, sneering. “Lucky I don’t make you clean the mess you made. Blood all over my kitchen tile.” Then she grabs his nose and jerks.

Harry screams.

“It’s set.” Petunia stands and tosses him a washrag. “Clean yourself up and get to bed.”

Harry darts to the door to listen. Once she’s back in the kitchen he slips some paracetamol out of the cabinet. He downs two with a cup of water, though it’s hard to swallow with his nose broken, and pockets four for later.

He leans over the washbasin and blows his nose, biting back the scream that wants to claw out of his throat. He rests his head against the mirror for a few minutes, pinching his nose, but the bleeding doesn’t stop.

“Bollocks.” At this rate he’ll get blood on the carpet too, so he packs his nose with tissue, cleans up the loo, and sneaks out the back for some air.

There’s a man standing in the back garden, lurking amongst the potted plants.

Harry freezes, nose forgotten, as adrenaline floods his system. Then what he’s seeing finally catches up to him and he’s frozen for an entirely different reason.

Dark, messy hair. Glasses. The shape of the nose and the cut of the jaw.

“Dad?” Harry whispers.

The man’s green eyes snap to his own. “Er, no, sorry.” He scratches the side of his head with a stick. “I’m you, actually. Call me Potter.”

So he’s crazy, Harry reasons to himself. But that’s okay. That’s why he hasn’t come to get him before. It makes so much sense he can’t help but grin.

Potter smiles back and gestures at Harry’s nose. “Vernon do that?”

Harry’s grin fades.

Then Potter waves his stick and a lot of things happen at once.

The packing flies out of Harry’s nose, which shifts inside his head. His eyes go wide and he prods his nose, taking a deep breath. There’s no pain. “What?”

“Magic,” Potter says. “We haven’t got much time, let me explain?”

Harry clenches his hands and nods.

“Magic is real. A wizard named Voldemort killed our parents. We survived with this scar.” Potter lifts up his fringe to show a matching scar to Harry’s own. “I killed him, but he did something that twists timelines trying to bring himself back to life. Turns out most of us, most Harry Potters, died as infants. Lots of the survivors weren’t skilled at magic.”

“And I am?” Harry cuts in. “Wait, mum and dad were murdered?”

“Let me guess, you appeared on a roof once with no idea how?”

Harry’s eyes widen.

“Yeah, thought so. So did I. But Vernon never broke my nose. Travel is possible at major divergences only, so I guess that counts. What’s the date?”

“July twenty-ninth,” Harry says. “Mum and dad?”

Potter nods. “Yeah, I don’t see how, but you turn eleven in two days, so sure.”

“Nevermind that, what about--”

“They died saving us,” Potter says. “Saving you. Loved you more than anything.”

Harry doesn’t know what to say to that, but this man looks like his older twin and he believes him. Something inside him breaks and hardens simultaneously. Faint lights from the telly flicker through the windows as they stand motionless in the garden.

It’s the most surreal thing Harry has ever experienced.

Potter throws a bit of wood at Harry and his hand snaps up to catch it. It’s a hexagon with intricate carvings.

“Magic Medium,” Potter says. “Wands have become, er, difficult in our realm since the Twist, but we can get you one eventually if you join up. You’ll have to make do with that for now, just affix it to your weapon of choice. Good luck and don’t die.”

“What?” Harry asks, and he feels he’s been asking that constantly, but Potter is gone and the flowers are glowing.

The world twists and flickers around him. The lights from inside snap off, then on, then fill his vision with distorted light.

A howl echoes from nowhere and an electric pink claw erupts from the potted plant at Harry’s feet. He leaps away, his back hitting the door, as dozens of violently bright animals appear from outside reality.

As one they turn to face him and scream, every mouth as wide as his head and full of needle-like teeth.

He yanks the door open and flees, only to fall with a sharp pain in his right calf. He twists and throws a punch at the thing latched onto him. It’s got ears like a cat and paws like a bear and it’s teeth snap off like porcupine quills in his leg.

Harry likes animals, never thought he’d want to hurt one, but he kicks the shit out of this thing and stumbles further into the house. The hallway lengthens as he runs down it and the house itself rattles with every step.

Affix to your weapon of choice, Potter had said.

Vernon keeps a hunting rifle in his closet, but Harry dismisses that idea. He doesn’t know how to use it.

A blue squirrel creature with hot pink markings leaps out of the telly and lands on his shoulder. Harry screams and gets an arm between it and his neck, throwing it into the wall where it bounces.

Harry falls again in the kitchen, right where he’d broken his nose earlier, and jumps over an alligator-weasel floating up through the tile. Fresh panic surges through him and he’s out the front door.

Vernon keeps a crowbar in the boot of his car. He tells people it’s for opening boxes at work, so he can segue into how hard-working and smart he is, but he tells Dudley it’s for protection from all the poors and weirdos. He always looks at Harry as he says this.

Harry pulls the lever to open the boot as something lands on his back. He jumps backward and falls onto his back, crushing it, and loses a nail trying to get off the asphalt.

Dozens of glowing beasts circle the car, closing in.

Harry grips the crowbar and presses the Magic Medium to it, adrenaline fueling the desire for it to just work please just work what is going on.

The crowbar glows with a faint light, outlined with the symbols that were on the bit of wood, and the colors match those of the things he’s fighting. Harry finds he’s quite capable of killing freaky animals after all.

Minutes later he stands, panting and covered in blood, as the world returns to normal. The dozens of mangled bodies, which now look like pets, surround him. He wants to cry, seeing the bodies, but he’s too hyped up and tired and pissed to bother.

Potter appears out of nowhere and ruffles Harry’s hair, eliciting a swing of the crowbar. “Not bad,” he says. “Most don’t manage.”

Harry can’t think straight but he still responds. “Thought you said I had a choice.” He’s trying to stem the blood from his ankle.

“You have a choice to join, not to take the test.”

“Fuck you,” Harry says, and it unnerves him because he’s never said ‘fuck’ out loud before.

Potter chuckles and gestures at the crowbar Harry’s holding.

It’s glowing with runes and Harry can feel the power in it. The magic.

“You can come with me to the Twist and deal with the fuck who killed our parents. Or you can stay. You’ll get a letter in a few days, inviting you to magic school. You’ll love it there.”

Harry rallies himself because this is important. Potter mentioned friends, but… “If I go with you, could I see my parents?” He pauses. “Not my actual ones, but James and Lily even so? Because of the different timelines?”

“Yes,” Potter says.

“Alright.”

Potter waves his stick and the dead animals turn into motes of light and form a portal through the hydrangea bushes.

Harry glances back at number four Privet Drive before resting his crowbar – his magic crowbar – over his shoulder and striding forward.

 

1488 words

 

Spoiler

Fun times in a trippy way. I'm a fan of a young protagonist who is in over his head with adult issues, and this seems to fit the bill so I'm engaged.

I think my favorite part here is the abrupt shift from cliche-HP-fic to 'interesting' - and that happens in the instant that Harry notices a man "lurking in the garden." It's a very sudden shift from Dursley abuse to AU-time-travel-older-Harry, and I love how unexpected and sudden it was.

After that though I feel the story suffered a bit, since the fight-sequence was not only too bare but too weird to really follow.

The ending and premise are okay, even if both show a lack of context / description / dialogue.

 

This was my story!
I wasn't trying to do a Joe impression, @Niez, but I'll take it as a positive review!

I enjoy writing Flash but I wasn't sure what to do with this one at first, since for flash pieces I'd tend to gravitate towards showing someone who isn't Harry. Someone we don't have so much insight into from both canon and our own fanfiction preferences. So early on I settled on 'something weird with action.'

The goal eventually was to start with 'boring cliche' then switch to 'weird crazy action' with a 'fight or flight adrenaline rush' in the middle.

That middle part, the turning point, is my favorite part of this. Where you're following kid!Harry as he deals with casual domestic abuse only to have your heart rate jump up as he walks out into the garden to find a grown man creeping in the plantlife. I love that part of this and I can't quite pinpoint why, but it became the focal point of the story for me.

Anyway. The boring cliche start certainly worked as intended, perhaps too well for some of you. And the weird action was certainly weird, but seems to have also fallen flat (some of which I chalk up to my own mediocre efforts at writing action and some of it simply because it's very weird).

The story started out closer to 2500 words and I might edit it back up to that length and repost it. I had to cut some things that might have helped with the flow / explanation, etc.

Thanks for all the reviews - really a pleasure reading them all, and got some great insights / feedback.


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Question - did everyone pick up on how... When Potter says that he is Harry, kid!Harry doesn't believe him at first and instead assumes that it's actually James but he's mentally insane. Harry gloms onto this explanation as a reason James never showed up before. It's a bit later that Harry starts to believe Potter is his older self, etc.

Did that come thru or was it lost?

 

Just rewrote this as an original story and put it in a small anthology with friends, for what that's worth. Came out at around 3500 instead of 1500. Might end up removing this one if I don't want them to be connected or editing it further to post as fanfic, not sure. Had to add some world building for the original version that HP didn't need.

Thanks for all the good feedback yet again. Wouldn't / couldn't have done it without ya.